Brain-Breaking Science & Sports References
Project Hail Mary hits you right out of the gate with a dual-timeline mystery. It starts with Ryland Grace waking up in a sterile room, completely hooked up to tubes, mind incredibly groggy, and his memory entirely wiped. He has absolute amnesia. To make matters worse, he is completely alone on this ship under incredibly grim circumstances. He has no clue where he is or what he’s even supposed to be doing. There’s just a robotic computerized voice nagging him to eat slop from a tube and refusing to let him progress until he can remember his own name. Thankfully, as Grace starts poking around and doing small tasks, his memory slowly ticks back in, piece by piece.
As it turns out, Grace is on a literal last-ditch mission to save Earth from an extinction-level event. But it begs a massive question: how on earth did a middle school science teacher end up on a solo interstellar spacecraft?
Side note: I absolutely loved the fact that I actually understood why the ship/mission has the name it does. I totally got the sports reference, which is a miracle because I do not do sports!
Slowly, the backstory fills in, and by the time Grace remembers the brutal truth of how he got there, he realizes this mission has fractured in almost every way possible.
Fair warning: beware the massive amounts of science and math! Honestly, the science absolutely broke my brain at times, which is the only reason this isn’t a perfect 5-star read for me. But if you’re like me, you can just coast right past those pesky technical details and let the characters do the heavy lifting.
I actually had to buddy-read this one with my favorite person, because let’s be honest—the movie adaptation is coming, and I am way too much of a book snob to ever watch the film without reading the book first!
And thank goodness we did read it together. What I enjoyed most about this story is a dynamic and an element of the plot that I refuse to spoil here, but I will say this: I don’t think I would have loved this book nearly as much as I did if we hadn’t experienced it on the page first. Grace’s backstory is fascinating, and the looming dread of what’s happening back on Earth is genuinely terrifying. He is humanity’s absolute last hope—but can he actually pull off this broken mission by himself?
